Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/05/05

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Subject: Re: [Leica] art, manual focus & other misunderstanding
From: Eric Welch <ewelch@ponyexpress.net>
Date: Wed, 05 May 1999 07:53:43 -0500

At 11:34 PM 5/4/99 -0300, you wrote:
>HCB was someday outside St.
>Lazare gate. He saw a puddle, he saw a ladder and he conceived a photo. It
>doesn't really matter if that moment of conception was separated by two
>seconds or two years from the "real" moment. As he says, the only instant
>that matters is the 1/125 f;8. And nothing else.

There is a whole world of difference between Dosineau paying a couple to go 
around Paris kissing, and HCB conceiving a picture by looking at the ladder 
in the puddle and waiting for someone to walk to the end and jump.

When you look at HCB's picture, you see something that really happened in 
the real world, without intervention - a fiction - by the photographer. 
That was a major part of HCB's aesthetic. To capture life. Not create fiction.

I could do what Dosineau did with a bunch of pictures and Photoshop. No big 
deal. No real effort. No great timing. No keen eye. That's the difference. 
Not that Dosineau's pictures aren't wonderful and meaningful in their own way.

But he is pulp fiction compared to HCB's documentary.

Eric Welch
St. Joseph, MO
http://www.ponyexpress.net/~ewelch

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